Iran's executions of juvenile offenders on July 19 violated international law, Human Rights Watch said. The organization condemned the public hangings of two teenagers, aged 18 and 16, after they were found guilty of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy 14 months earlier. The older convict was 17 at the time of the offense.

China arrested more than 800,000 people last year for endangering state security or for being involved in activities regarded as separatist, terrorist or extremist, a top official.

US Catholic bishops launched a campaign against the death penalty and presented new data suggesting support for capital punishment among American Catholics had fallen sharply in recent years to below 50 percent. Washington Archbishop Theodore McCarrick told a news conference the campaign would bring renewed urgency and energy to efforts to end capital punishment.

the number of people sentenced to death last year in the United States fell to the lowest level since the US Supreme Court reinstated the penalty in 1976.

the Bush administration decided to pull out of an international agreement that opponents of the death penalty have used to fight the sentences of foreigners on death row in the United States, officials said.

the White House has ordered state courts to consider the complaints of 51 Mexican foreign nationals on death row in the United States, International Herald Tribune reported.

the US Supreme Court ruled the US Constitution generally forbids the use of shackles for a defendant at a sentencing hearing to determine whether the death penalty will be imposed.

a legislative committee rejected a bill on April 12 aimed at reinstating the state's death penalty, which a court had suspended last year.

preliminary data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report for 2004 found that murders in the U. S. dropped last year by 3.6%. The number of executions also declined in 2004.

the NACDL's Spring Meeting will be held in New York from April 14 to April 17, 2005. An important occasion to be involved in the ever-expanding International Criminal Law arena.

American researchers have called for a halt to lethal injection, the most common method of execution in the United States, because it is not always a humane and painless way to die.